But the chemistry of the twentieth century had far more spectacular mind-altering drugs in store than ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’. The harbinger of these was mescaline, the hallucinogenic alkaloid of the peyote cactus, which native Mexican peoples had been taking for sacramental purposes since prehistoric times and which had spread north during the nineteenth century as old tribal structures were disrupted. James Mooney, a young ethnographer from the Smithsonian Institution who was studying the Ghost Dance movement that had arisen among the Sioux tribes in 1890 became the first white man to be initiated into its mysteries. Seated around a sagebrush fire in a tepee in a circle of braves, painted and feathered and in their finest buckskin, he chewed and swallowed four peyote buttons, and noted their ‘especially wonderful mental effects’. After a night of drumming and chanting, Mooney was asked to ‘go back and tell the whites that the Indians had a religion of their own which they loved’.
The ‘discovery’ of peyote, however, was rapidly claimed for science, and the race to discover its active ingredient began immediately. The only substance known at the time to produce powerful hallucinogenic effects lasting several hours was hashish, but the self-experimenting chemist Arthur Hefiter of the University of Leipzig eventually isolated a new crystalline substance that he named after ‘mescal’, as the peyote plant was then known to cactologists. During the 1890s mescaline was dubbed ‘a new artificial paradise’, and was explored from many different angles. Pharmacists trialled it as a heart stimulant and a nerve tonic; the leading American psychiatrist Silas Weir Mitchell experimented with it as an aid to psychotherapy; and the British sexologist and art critic Havelock Ellis compared its effects on perception to Maori wood-carving and arabesque tapestry, the painting of Monet and the poetry of Wordsworth.
Despite the contemporary panics over opiates and cocaine, mescaline was not regarded as a ‘drug’ but a research chemical, and it was added to the Parke-Davis catalogue without controls. Although it never found a therapeutic application, it continued to be of interest to psychologists studying perception and cognition, and to artists of the modernist avant-garde such as Henri Michaux and Stanislaw Witkiewicz, who used it tc induce fertile states of creative derangement. It was in this self-experimental tradition that Aldous Huxley produced the most celebrated work of mescaline reportage, Doors of Perception, in 1954; but by this time another far more potent hallucinogen had emerged from the Sandoz laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. On 19 April 1943 Albert Hofmann, . chemist researching derivatives of the ergot fungus in the search for a vasoconstrictor to treat haemmorhages, took a tiny experimental dose of lysergic acid diethylamide, and within an hour found himself experiencing violent changes in perception. He headed for home on a bicycle, but by the time he arrived the world had transformed entirely, dissolving into a flux of kaleidoscopic spirals and fountains.
The mescaline-containing peyote cactus (top) was adopted as a sacrament in the late nineteenth century by many Native American groups, such as the Comanche, whose peyote ceremony (above) was photographed by the ethnographer James Mooney in Oklahoma in r892. (Top: photo Christian Ratsch; above: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Maryland NAAINV 06275300)
LS D, as it became known, was a focus of intense interest in a post-war world where ‘psychotropic’ medications such as lithium were promising a radical expansion of drug therapies for depression and other mood disorders. Psychotherapists reported the astonishing progress made with long sessions of analysis under its influence, during which patients could unlock deeply buried traumas and gain an empowering sense of perspective on their lives. But, as its use spread, it became clear that similar benefits could also be experienced by those who were not ill or under medical supervision. Particularly in California, where therapy mingled with the cults of Hollywood celebrity and radical self-improvement, LSD began to be promoted as an experience that would add richness to the life of anyone who chose to take it. As it diffused into the emerging counterculture, it made a rapid transit from research chemical to ‘drug’, and when the Sandoz patent expired in 1963 it became a controlled substance. Mescaline followed soon after, with the Native American Church eventually winning a hard-fought legal exclusion to permit their religious use of the peyote cactus.
But the prohibition of LSD and mescaline could not obscure the chemical vistas their discovery had opened up. Both, it had become clear, were representatives of large families of related substances, with effects on consciousness thus far entirely unknown. Among those exploring this terra incognita was a Californian biochemist named Alexander Shulgin. He had developed prohtable pesticides for the Dow Chemical Company, and had been given the freedom to research new psychopharmacology compounds, working with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), for whom he wouk perform chemical assays on samples and appear in court as an expert witness. In 1965 Shulgin left Dow to become an independent researcher, working out of a private laboratory in the hills outside San Erancisco with a DEA licence to manufacture scheduled drugs.
Shulgin recognized that the phenethlyamines - the family of drugs to which mescaline belonged - formed a continuum with the amphetamines, and that there were hundreds of intermediates that might combine the hallucinogenic effects of the former with the euphoric and stimulant effects of the latter. It emerged that one of these compounds, methyldioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), had been synthesized by Mercl in Germany as far back as 1912, but had never been tested. He developed a new synthesis, and in 1976 began producing the substance that would soon be known as ecstasy. Thereafter Shulgin’s laboratory became the birthplace of hundreds of new compounds, their chemical formulae abbreviated to an alphabet soup of names such as 2C-B, DOM and 2C-T-7. It also became th( focus for a discreet network of self-experimenters who tested the effects of the new compounds, taking them in carefully recorded doses and publishing their findings anonymously.
Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, is commemorated in the celebrated ‘blotter art’ of Wes Black. The image is printed across a sheet of tiny perforated squares of blotting paper, the form in which doses of LSD are commonly produced for the illicit market. (Courtesy of the artist and blotterart. com)
Shulgin spent his early career testing laboratory drugs on animals in the conventional manner, but regards the need for self-experimentation with psychoactive drugs as obvious to anyone who gives the matter some thought’. Each new substance that emerges from the laboratory is a tabula rasa: its effect on human consciousness cannot be predicted simply from its chemical structure. Although the DEA has attempted to curtail his work since he published his research notes and syntheses in two doorstopping volumes, Shulgin continues to publish, and to unfold new psychopharmaceutical vistas. In recent years he has pioneered the synthesis of ‘fly’ and ‘dragonfly’ compounds - wing-like extensions to the molecular structure that create new and more potent variations on his already vast repertoire. The permutations maybe, to all practical purposes, infinite.
World History
